Pluralsight pops more than 30% in its public debut

Pluralsight is having a pretty good day in its debut as a public company, with its shares popping more than 30% after its first trade following its IPO.

There’ll be a little bit of debate as to whether Pluralsight might have left some money on the table in its IPO after raising its price last night above its original target range. After looking at a range between $12 and $14 per share, the company settled on $15 in an IPO that would raise as much as $357 including additional shares offered to underwriters. But the significant pop this morning suggests that there is both a lot of demand for the company, and also that it could have potentially captured more capital in its IPO.

Still, Pluralsight will be considered a pretty successful one this morning, much like zScalar and Dropbox before it. Pluralsight, like many other enterprise-focused companies, offers investors an opportunity to tap a business model that can grow more consistently and methodically than a consumer company subject to the whims of fickle consumers. While Dropbox has more of a hybrid model, it was considered a substantially successful enterprise IPO, as was zScalar and others earlier this year.

Pluralsight offers companies a way to run courses that help their employees pick up new software engineering skills. That’s important for larger companies that can have a sprawling employee base, offering them an opportunity to find talent in their own workforces that might be missing a few skills instead of having to look out in a very competitive landscape. That minted another successful unicorn startup in the Utah tech scene, and now the company is going to potentially offer a nice return for its investors and an opportunity for investors with some appetite for risky early IPOs.

The company launched in 2004 and was largely bootstrapped until its first financing round in 2013, and raised nearly $200 million total prior to going public. Having a successful IPO like this one is also going to have the ancillary effect of keeping up morale at the company, as well as attracting talent with generous compensation packages. Pluralsight can point to the pop in its IPO and ongoing performance as a public barometer of its success, and the interest Wall Street has in it going forward as a good investment.